Racing Odysseus
Racing Odysseus

Author: Roger H. Martin

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-11-15

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 0520942078

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The idea of reliving youth is a common fantasy, but who among us is actually courageous enough to try it? After surviving a deadly cancer against tremendous odds, college president Roger H. Martin did just that—he enrolled at St. John's College, the Great Books school in Annapolis, Maryland, as a sixty-one-year-old freshman. This engaging, often humorous memoir of his semester at St. John's tells of his journey of discovery as he falls in love again with Plato, Socrates, and Homer, improbably joins the college crew team, and negotiates friendships across generational divides. Along the way, Martin ponders one of the most pressing questions facing education today: do the liberal arts still have a role to play in a society that seems to value professional, vocational, and career training above all else? Elegantly weaving together the themes of the great works he reads with events that transpire on the water, in the coffee shop, and in the classroom, Martin finds that a liberal arts education may be more vital today than ever before. This is the moving story of a man who faces his fears, fully embraces his second chance, and in turn rediscovers the gifts of life and learning.

Odysseus in America
Odysseus in America

Author: Jonathan Shay

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2010-05-11

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 1439125015

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In this ambitious follow-up to Achilles in Vietnam, Dr. Jonathan Shay uses the Odyssey, the story of a soldier's homecoming, to illuminate the pitfalls that trap many veterans on the road back to civilian life. Seamlessly combining important psychological work and brilliant literary interpretation with an impassioned plea to renovate American military institutions, Shay deepens our understanding of both the combat veteran's experience and one of the world's greatest classics. In Achilles in Vietnam, Dr. Jonathan Shay used the story of the Iliad as a prism through which to examine how ancient and modern wars have battered the psychology of the men who fight. Now he turns his attention to the Odyssey, the story of a soldier's homecoming, to illuminate the real problems faced by combat veterans reentering civilian society. The Odyssey, Shay argues, offers explicit portrayals of behavior common among returning soldiers in our own culture: danger-seeking, womanizing, explosive violence, drug abuse, visitation by the dead, obsession, vagrancy and homelessness. Supporting his reading with examples from his fifteen-year practice treating Vietnam veterans, Shay shows how Odysseus's mistrustfulness, his lies, and his constant need to conceal his thoughts and emotions foreshadow the experiences of many of today's veterans. He also explains how veterans recover and advocates changes to American military practice that will protect future servicemen and servicewomen while increasing their fighting power. Throughout, Homer strengthens our understanding of what a combat veteran must overcome to return to and flourish in civilian life, just as the heartbreaking stories of the veterans Shay treats give us a new understanding of one of the world's greatest classics.

The Odyssey
The Odyssey

Author: Homer

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 1997-11-01

Total Pages: 568

ISBN-13: 9780140268867

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The great epic of Western literature, translated by the acclaimed classicist Robert Fagles A Penguin Classic Robert Fagles, winner of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and a 1996 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, presents us with Homer's best-loved and most accessible poem in a stunning modern-verse translation. "Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy." So begins Robert Fagles' magnificent translation of the Odyssey, which Jasper Griffin in the New York Times Book Review hails as "a distinguished achievement." If the Iliad is the world's greatest war epic, the Odyssey is literature's grandest evocation of an everyman's journey through life. Odysseus' reliance on his wit and wiliness for survival in his encounters with divine and natural forces during his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War is at once a timeless human story and an individual test of moral endurance. In the myths and legends retold here, Fagles has captured the energy and poetry of Homer's original in a bold, contemporary idiom, and given us an Odyssey to read aloud, to savor, and to treasure for its sheer lyrical mastery. Renowned classicist Bernard Knox's superb introduction and textual commentary provide insightful background information for the general reader and scholar alike, intensifying the strength of Fagles's translation. This is an Odyssey to delight both the classicist and the general reader, to captivate a new generation of Homer's students. This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition features French flaps and deckle-edged paper. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Racing Odysseus
Racing Odysseus

Author: Roger H. Martin

Publisher:

Published: 2010-01-18

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780520265875

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"I think this is a very good book indeed: extremely readable with a very human story to tell (about the author's journey to rediscover himself and education after facing imminent death) and a message to send (about the role of the liberal arts in our lives as well as our education). Martin employs compelling references to and quotations from the classical texts he read in the St. John's freshman seminar: this is not heavy-handed 'you should read Aeschylus if you want to call yourself educated' stuff, but rather the humble confession of a humanist who knows one is never too old, educated, or experienced to learn something new or again. And that is a message that will always be valuable."--Loren J. Samons II, author of What's Wrong with Democracy: From Athenian Practice to American Worship "Roger Martin has created a riveting narrative of his confrontation with mortality, and, in that encounter, a testimonial to the enduring value of liberal education."--Douglas W. Foard, Executive Secretary (ret.) of Phi Beta Kappa

The Odyssey
The Odyssey

Author: Homer

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2010-05-25

Total Pages: 471

ISBN-13: 1407066277

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Penelope has been waiting for her husband Odysseus to return from Troy for many years. Little does she know that his path back to her has been blocked by astonishing and terrifying trials. Will he overcome the hideous monsters, beautiful witches and treacherous seas that confront him? This rich and beautiful adventure story is one of the most influential works of literature in the world.

Breakaway Learners
Breakaway Learners

Author: Karen Gross

Publisher: Teachers College Press

Published: 2017-04-21

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0807758426

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This powerful book explores how institutions of higher education can successfully serve breakaway studentsfirst-generation, low-income students who are trying to break away from the past in order to create a more secure future. The gap between low-SES and high-SES students persists as efforts to close it have not met with great success. In this provocative book, Gross offers a new approach to addressing inequities by focusing on students who have succeeded despite struggling with the impacts of poverty and trauma. Gross draws on her experience as a college president to outline practical steps that post-secondary institutions can take to create structures of support and opportunity that build reciprocal trust. Students must trust their institutions and professors, professors must trust their students, and eventually students must learn to trust themselves.

Communicate for a Change
Communicate for a Change

Author: Lori Carrell

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2021-09-28

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 1421441756

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This is a different kind of book: a call for courageous conversations focusing on nine taboo subjects that bedevil higher education. For nearly a decade, distinguished scholars Lori Carrell and Robert Zemsky have been having frank conversations with each other—and with colleagues and friends—about the state of higher education. In Communicate for a Change, they bring together nine of their most insightful conversations to explore difficult questions that today's administrators, trustees, and faculty members too frequently avoid. Why, Carrell and Zemsky ask, is it so hard to talk about the mess that higher education is in? And how can we refocus the conversation on what really matters, grappling with taboo subjects in a way that helps to revitalize higher education from the inside out? Grounded in the real, as opposed to the rhetorical, importance of community in making change, these revealing conversations also explore • why the public no longer sees faculty as heroes and experts • how to overcome the academy's fondness for slogans • how money talks • why curricular change doesn't (usually) happen • the students we hardly know and how we might come to know them better • how to constructively approach differences of race and gender • and much more A golden thread weaves its way through the book, revealing the premise that rich, honest talk can generate trust, connection, and fresh ideas for revolutionary change. Carrell, the chancellor of the University of Minnesota Rochester, is by both training and instinct a testifier. Learning for her is tangible, a product of truly getting dirty, sorting through the muck of conflict as well as connection. Zemsky, on the other hand, is a provocateur who pushes an argument as a means to explore differences and conflicts. Both are natural storytellers. Their conversations are enriched by the contributions of a host of higher education experts and leaders. Breaking new ground in terms of both its subject matter and its format, Communicate for a Change is an accessible and engaging catalyst that will kick-start subsequent deliberations.

Homer's Secret Odyssey
Homer's Secret Odyssey

Author: Kenneth Wood

Publisher: The History Press

Published: 2011-04-11

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0752463896

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Homer is renowned as the finest of the storytellers who for countless generations passed down by word of mouth the myths and legends of Ancient Greece. Yet, for some 2500 years there have been persistent folk memories that his genius extended far beyond literature and that scientific knowledge was hidden in his stories of heroes and villains, gods and ghosts, monsters and witches. Research now reveals that at a time when the Greeks did not have a written script, Homer concealed an astonishing range of learning about calendar making and cycles of the sun, moon and planet Venus in the Odyssey, his epic of the Fall of Troy and the adventures of the warrior-king Odysseus.